Some days ago the papers reported that a Somali man had been caught in the act raping a Swedish woman in Gżira. The police did their job and it turned out that the rape was not a rape after all. The man was released and that was that, which is fine by me.
What isn’t fine is the way the social media went into heat the minute the first part of the story broke. I’d like to do the honourable thing and pick on the comments made by two gentlemen of leisure. I know they’re two among very many, but I don’t care.
The main reason why I choose these two in particular is symmetry. Both are in the public eye, both contested the 2009 MEP elections on a main party ticket, neither was elected, both appear to be profoundly attached to the seaside town where they live, and, above all, both are respectable men who are obviously in love with their own respectability.
Both are also extremely clever and have strings of degrees to their names.
The Labour man assures us that he has “thousands of books in his personal collection”. The Nationalist can solve a Rubik’s cube before you can say ‘deportation’. The point is that there can be no doubting their extreme cleverness.
Steve Borg is a 50-something environmentalist, artist, librarian, and champion of all things pure enough to be truly Maltese. His favourite topic seems to be Marsascala, a town he believes has much to be immodest about. I’m told by locals who know him that he is a thoroughly decent and respectable man.
That puts him in the same category as Frank Portelli, probably best known as the upright doctor who at one point was on television practically every day to preach the importance of fair play and to inveigh against all forms of wrongdoing.
He has a penchant for old photos of St Paul’s Bay and is known in that town as a thoroughly decent and respectable man.
The uncanny resemblance doesn’t end there. Borg and Portelli clearly share a fear of migrants, and in particular the kind who come from Africa. ‘Illegal immigration’ was right at the very top of the agenda in Borg’s 2009 campaign. Not to be outdone, Portelli ‘talked tough’ on migration at every turn.
I’m not saying they’re racists or anything of the sort. I did say they are both, both respectable men.
I was therefore rather surprised at the way they reacted, in public, to the case at hand. On Facebook, Borg wrote “Ħaseb li għadu s-Somalja” (“He probably thought he was still in Somalia”); Portelli simply wrote“Integration”.
As expected, the two posts turned out to be the perfect prompts for the staple rounds of racism, xenophobia, and downright pig-headedness.
Borg went on to write that the percentage of crimes committed by Somalis in Malta was worrying, and that the reason behind the rape (that wasn’t) was that rape was perfectly normal business in Somalia. He probably read that in his thousands of books.
There is a direct link between racist and xenophobic comments made in public by respectable men and the experiences of black people on the ground
Portelli’s recent history of Facebook posts is more colourful. He seems fixated with all things African, Muslim, and migrant (preferably combined in some way). His take on the Daboma Jack case included the gem that “there is considerable evidence that black men abuse white women for deep seared (sic) psychological reasons”.
It turns out that Portelli is also highly interested in the burka, women’s rights, female genital mutilation and HIV. He assures us that “migrants form one per cent of the population yet carry 40 per cent of HIV”. Funny, because one might expect a doctor to care for the welfare of sufferers, rather than to kvetch about their existence and presence in Malta. Still, he can solve the Rubik’s cube, so he knows best.
There’s a reason why I chose to write about respectable men and to illustrate my argument using such pre-eminent examples. It’s called Gadaa and it came to Malta from Ethiopia 10 years ago.
I first got to know Gadaa when I interviewed him as part of the admission process at University. His competence was such that the interview was a foregone conclusion.
He went on to get a first and eventually a specialised postgraduate degree. He considers himself well-settled in Malta and has many friends. He also has a Maltese girlfriend who he doesn’t abuse, in spite of the deep-seated psychological reasons.
As people in these situations tend to do, Gadaa is looking for a job. Given his qualifications, he thinks it’s not entirely unreasonable for him to apply for jobs that do not involve cleaning or construction. That’s where his ambition has hit a brick wall.
Gadaa is not stupid, nor does he have a sense of entitlement. He quite understands that getting a job in his field is no straightforward matter, for him or any of his Maltese friends. All he wants is a fair chance – the kind of fair play Portelli so loves to perorate about, in fact.
Which is why he was at his wits’ end when I met him last week. He told me that most would-be-employers simply refused to take him seriously. It wasn’t that they were hostile or rude or anything, just that he could sense that they thought he had no business being at an interview in the first place.
There’s more. Gadaa’s experience in Malta has been a mixed bag. That’s probably true for most of us. But there were times when things got really ugly and when, unlike most of us, he discovered he could not count on the State to protect him. On one occasion, for example, he went to the police station to report a car driver who had called him a monkey. The officers on duty told him to get lost, and that was that.
Now I know it wasn’t Portelli who interviewed Gadaa. I also suspect that Borg is not in the habit of rolling down the car window and insulting people. Only I’m not reassured. On the contrary, I’m completely convinced that the public rants of our respectable men, and Gadaa’s experiences, are, in fact, related.
I realise I’m making a huge logical leap here, but I’d argue that there is a direct link between racist and xenophobic comments (that’s assuming that to say that black men have it in their psyche to violate white women is vaguely racist) made in public by respectable men, and the experiences of black people on the ground.
People like Portelli and Borg have a lot to answer for. It’s easy enough to sit in a study overlooking St Paul’s Bay or Marsascala and post comments on Facebook. Things are considerably harder for Gadaa and for the thousands of young men and women whose hopes are dashed in consequence.
mafalzon@hotmail.com